Human Practices

• Educative
• Corporative
• Social

Corporative axis

In this section we aim to know the expert's opinion about our projects in order to get advices and suggestions about how improve the design of Nicko and Chimi. Here we have interviewed to professionals in the area of bioremediation and veterinary and have told them about our projects and they have told us their opinions and comments.

Corporative axis

The Activities

Interviewing experts

Nicko's applicability

In order to know how feasible a system for nickel removal based on a magnetotactic bacteria is, it means Nicko, we were talking to an expert in water bioremediation. The selected expert was Johana Husserl, she is Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from Georgia Institute of Techonoly and Ms.C. from Tulane University. At the present time she is working as a professor at Universidad de los Andes, leading subjects related to Environmental Engineering like Environmental Chemistry among others. She has worked in water treatment and explosive removal from soil with bacteria. You can find the audio of the interview (with English subtitles) below:



In brief words, she belives that a nickel removal system would be a very useful tool to solve problems of contaminated water that are common in our country. And the idea of a bacteriaum capable of accumulating a metal is very interesting, even without a special extraction system like the magnetism, which is a plus in our project.

BHP Billiton

BHP Billiton is the biggest minig and petroleum company of the world and it is responsible for ferronickel explotation in Cerro Matoso. We called many many times and send to them information about Nicko and about iGEM but they didn't want to do public declarations about Nicko's applicability. :(

Chimi's applicability

As a part of our project, it was important for us to talk to experts in animal health to see if our product could be used in the field of veterinary clinics and to know a little more about the stress in animal health and the current methods used to sense glucocorticoids in animals. The next is an interview with the vet Leonel Cardona at La Salle University.

One more time, we got great opinions from experts, he though our project would have a big utility in his job, so we have taken into account his recomendations and experiences as a part of the development of our project.

Listening our partners

In addition to the important experts' opinion, we wanted to listen our partners as well. The Student Council of the Department of Biological Science at Universidad de los Andes organizes the called "Seminarios de lo Oculto" which are conferences developed by students about different topics related to science. We took advatage of this space to talk to undergraduate students of Biology, Microbiology and related programs about Nicko and Chimi.

In the same way of all described before, we carried out a great feedback from this exprience. We listened to the questions that our partners did and we took into account their comments to improve our projects with their opinions, which are not other thing than opinions of future professionals.

In addition, our conference was also an opportunity to give out our ideas in our Faculty and promote debate around them.

Here, some pictures of our speakers :)

Poster of our conference

Talking about Nicko & Chimi

Debate with students

More activities on the other two axes:

Social! Educative!